Books

In A Sensory Education (2020) Anna shows that our sensing is not innate or acquired, but in fact evolves through learning that is shaped by social and material relations. The chapters feature diverse sources of sensory education, including field manuals, mannequins, cookbooks and flavour charts. The examples range from medical training – drawing from fieldwork from the Making Clinical Sense project – to forest bathing and cooking classes. With hand-drawn illustrations and sensory lessons throughout, the book looks at the uncanny and taken-for-granted ways in which adults are trained to improve their senses. It may be of interest to those teaching courses related to everyday life, technologies and the senses or teachers looking for sensory exercises for their students; to students and scholars from across the social sciences, particularly of the senses and embodied expertise; to workshop organisers looking for creative ideas; and to anyone who takes a personal interest in learning sensory practices like cooking, knitting, bird watching, wine tasting and gardening, to name a few.

Thanks to funding from the European Research Council, the book is Open Access and you can download both the chapters and shorter sensory lessons for free from Routledge. The book is part of the Sensory Studies series edited by David Howes.

Find more at the publishers’ website, including a free PDF of the book: https://www.routledge.com/A-Sensory-Education/Harris/p/book/9781350056121

Harris, Anna (2020). A Sensory Education, Sensory Studies Series, London: Routledge.

In Stethoscope: Making of a Medical Icon (2022) Anna Harris and Tom Rice explore the colorful past, present, and future of an instrument that is, quite literally, close to our hearts. The stethoscope has become the symbol of medicine itself—how did this come to be? What makes the stethoscope such a familiar yet charismatic object? Drawing from a range of fields including history, anthropology, science, technology, and sound studies, the book illustrates the variety of roles the stethoscope has played over time. It shows that the stethoscope is not, and has never been, a single entity. It is used to a variety of ends, serves several purposes, and is open to many interpretations. This variability is the key to the stethoscope’s enduring presence in the medical and popular imagination.

Harris, Anna and Rice, Tom (2022) Stethoscope: Making of a Medical Icon. London: Reaktion.

The book Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge (2022) offers a critical reflection on the relationship between materials and the reproduction of medical knowledge. Medical knowledge manifests in materials, and materials are integral to the reproduction of medical knowledge. From the novice student to the expert practitioner, those who study and work in and around medicine rely on material guidance in their everyday practice and as they seek to further their craft. To that end, this edited collection brings together historians, anthropologists, educators, artists, and curators to explore the role of materiality in medical education. With a broad temporal focus and international scope, the volume focuses on the materials, objects, tools, and technologies that facilitate the reproduction of medical knowledge and often also reify understandings of medical science. Experimental in form and supplemented with ethnographic, museological, and historical cases from around the world, this edited volume is the first to fully explore the matter of medical education in the modern world.

Nott, John and Harris, Anna (eds). (2022). Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge. London: Intellect Books. 

The book Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment in the Humanities and Social Sciences offers, for the first time, sustained, interdisciplinary reflections on performative methods, variously known as Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment (RRR) practices across the fields of history of science, archaeology, art history, conservation, musicology and anthropology. Each of these fields has distinct histories, approaches, tools and research questions. Researchers in the historical disciplines have used reconstructions to learn about the materials and practices of the past, while anthropologists and ethnographers have more often studied the re-enactments themselves, participating in these performances as engaged observers. In this book, authors bring their experiences of RRR practices within their discipline into conversation with RRR practices in other disciplines, providing a basis for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization.

Dupré, Sven, Anna Harris, Julia Kursell, Patricia Lulof and Maartje Stols-Witlox, (Eds.) (2020). Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Peer-reviewed journal articles

Harris, Anna (2023) Sensing and the Shadows: Invisible Work in Medical Education in the Netherlands, Medical Anthropology, online first.

Harris, Anna (2023). Gridding bodies: A topographical survey of teaching touch in medical school, The Senses & Society: 1-14.

Nott, John (2023). Architecture for anatomy: History, affect, and the material reproduction of the body in two medical school buildings. Body & Society, 29(2): 99-129.

Nott, John, and Anna Harris (2023). Teaching the Normal and the Pathological: Educational Technologies and the Material Reproduction of Medicine. Science As Culture, 32(2): 214-239.

Harris, Anna (2021). Tangled, tangy threads: Textural methods for rendering past, present and future sensory memories, Multimodality & Society, 1(3): 266-280.

Harris, Anna (2021). On the fabric of the human body in seven text-iles: The multimodality of learning anatomy, Multimodality & Society 1(1): 8-19.

Harris, Anna (2021). Making measuring bodies, Science, Technology, & Human Values: 1-24.

Maslen, Sarah and Anna Harris (2021). Becoming a diagnostic agent: A collated ethnography of digital-sensory work in caregiving intra-actions, Social Science & Medicine 277: 113927.

van Drie, Melissa and Anna Harris (2020). The stethoscope goes digital, Gesnerus: Swiss Journal of the History of Medicine and Sciences 77(1): 123 – 148.

Nott, John and Anna Harris (2020). Sticky models: History as friction in obstetric education, Medicine Anthropology Theory 7(1): 44-65.

Craddock, Paul and Anna Harris (2020). Workshopping: Exploring the entanglement of sites, tools, and bodily possibilities in an academic gathering, Journal of Embodied Research 3(1): 2 (16:17).

Harris, Anna, Andrea Wojcik and Rachel Vaden Allison (2020). How to make an omelette: A sensory experiment in team ethnography, Qualitative Research 20(5): 632-648.

Harris, Anna (2018). Working on the bias, Invited commentary for Perspectives on Medical Education 7(2):  67-68.

Harris, Anna and Jan-Joost Rethans (2018). Expressive instructions: Ethnographic insights into the creativity and improvisation entailed in teaching physical skills to medical students. Perspectives on Medical Education 7: 232-238.

With commentary: Gormley, Gerard J. and Paul Murphy (2018). Teaching clinical skills in the theatre of medicine, Perspectives on Medical Education 7: 226–227.

Book chapters

Harris, Anna (2023). How to disrupt our field habits with sensory probes, in Tomás Sánchez Criado and Adolfo Estalella (Eds.), An Ethnographic Inventory: Field Devices for Anthropological Inquiery (pp. 182-191). Routledge: London and New York.

Nott, John and Anna Harris (2022). ‘Introduction: What Matters in Medical Education’. In John Nott and Anna Harris (Eds.), Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge (pp. 9-22). London: Intellect Books.

Wyatt, Sally (2022). ‘Objectivity, Art and Medical Images’. In John Nott and Anna Harris (Eds.), Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge (pp. 43-47). London: Intellect.

Harder, Christine den, and Anna Harris (2022). ‘Lessons from a Balloon’. In John Nott and Anna Harris (Eds.), Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge (pp. 48-55).London: Intellect.

Allison, Rachel Vaden (2022). ‘Anatomy of a Chalkboard’. In John Nott and Anna Harris (Eds.), Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge (pp. 71-91). London: Intellect.

van Lente, Harro (2022). ‘Circulation: Circulated Concepts, Images and Objects’. In John Nott and  Anna Harris (Eds.), Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge (pp. XX). London: Intellect.

Wyatt, Sally (2022). ‘Invisible work’. In John Nott and Anna Harris (Eds.), Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge (pp. 267-271). London: Intellect.

Kumoji, Robert and John Nott (2022). ‘The Pathology Museum at Korle Bu’. In John Nott and Anna Harris (Eds.), Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge (pp. 281 – 294). London: Intellect.

Nott, John and Rachel Vaden Allison (2022). ‘Matters of Place and Affect’. In John Nott and Anna Harris (Eds.), Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge (pp. 325 – 328). London: Intellect.

Wojcik, Andrea (2022). ‘Simulations in Health Professions Education’. In John Nott and Anna Harris (Eds.), Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge (pp. 361-364). London: Intellect.

Wojcik, Andrea, Victor Mogre, Anthony Amalba, Celia YamileRodriguez and Francis A. Abantanga (2022). ‘The Fake Wound: Thinking Through Materials in OSCE Simulations’. In John Nott and Anna Harris (Eds.), Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge (pp. 412 – 428). London: Intellect.

Sánchez Burmester, Candida. F. (2022). ‘Zebras, not Horses: On Limits and Margins of Biomedical Knowledge’. In John Nott and Anna Harris (Eds.), Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge (pp. 429-434). London: Intellect.

Dupré, Sven, Anna Harris, Julia Kursell, Patricia Lulof and Maartje Stols-Witlox. (2020). “Introduction” in Sven Dupré, Anna Harris, Patricia Lulof, Julia Kursell, Maartje Stols-Witlox (Eds.),  Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment in the Humanities and Social Sciences (pp. 9-24). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Wojcik, Andrea, Rachel Vaden Allison and Anna Harris (2020). Bumbling Along Together: Producing Collaborative Fieldnotes, In Casey Burkholder and Jennifer Thompson (Eds.), Fieldnotes in Qualitative Education and Social Science Research: Approaches, Practices, and Ethical Considerations (pp. 201-2016). Routledge: New York.

Harris, Anna (2018). Autophony: Listening to your Eyes Move, In Emily Yates-Doerr and Christine Labuski (Eds.), The Ethnographic Case. Mattering Press: Manchester and London.

Harris, Anna (2021). A Training Program for Students of the Senses in Sensing Art, Training the Body Marres (pp. 333-344).

Other articles

Harris, Anna and Lisa Herzog (2021). What might mushroom hunters teach the doctors of tomorrow?, Psyche. February 22.

Harris, Anna, Sally Wyatt, Andrea Wojcik, Harro van Lente and John Nott in correspondence with Rachel Vaden Allison and Carla Greubel (2020). Thumbnail sketches: Learning the worlds of others through collaborative imaginative ethnography, American Anthropologist.

Harris, Anna and John Harris (2020). TT01: Playing in the Pandemic, Cultural Praxis, July 8.

Harris, Anna and Andrea Wojcik (2020). Digital learning, Covid-19, Fieldsights, Society for Cultural Anthropology, May 6.

Harris, Anna (2019). The culinary art of clinical simulation, The Gourmand, June edition: 40-47.

Special issue editorials & web articles 

Bijsmans, Patrick and Anna Harris. (2022, June 23). Using games to activate students in PBL: Reflections from a CPD workshop. Web publication/site, FASoS Teaching & Learning Blog.

Harris, Anna. (2022, May 17). Opening the library doors. The GYA Blog.

Wyatt, Sally (2021). Writing Life No. 6: An interview with Sally Wyatt, Interview by Claudia Egher. Somatosphere. Writing Life series. January 29.

Rice, Tom (2021). Writing Life No. 4: An Interview with Tom Rice, Interview by Carla Greubel. Somatosphere. Writing Life series. January 15.

Taylor, Janelle (2021). Writing Life No. 3: An Interview with Janelle Taylor, Interview by Anna Harris. Somatosphere. Writing Life series. January 8.

Rachel, Prentice (2020). Writing Life No. 1: An Interview with Rachel Prentice, Interview by Andrea Wojcik. Somatosphere. Writing Life series. December 4.

Harris, Anna, Shanti Sumartojo and Sally Wyatt (2020). Designing for atmospheres of learning, FASoS Research – Debates about PBL, Group Dynamics, Quality of Education. January 15.

Multimodal output

Koski K, Soula N, van Veen A, Harris A (2022) Lunchtime Surgery Class. Film, 7’15”. Semi-Finalist at BIDEODROMO International Experimental Film and Video Festival. October 3, 2022. Bilbao, Spain.

Harris, Anna; Thissen, Lotte; Anschütz, Sarah; Akom Ankobrey, Gladys; Mesman, Jessica; Ghergu, Christian and Smolka, Mareike. (Author) (2021). Introducing the Maastricht University Ethnography Group. Film.

Harris, A (2020). Crafting medicine: A sensory exploration of three medical schools. Online sensory exhibition. Poster session presented at 4S/EASST 2020, “Making and Doing” Sessions, Prague, Czech Republic. 

The project has also been informed by these publications:

Harris, Anna and Flynn, Eleanor (2017). Medical education of attention: A qualitative study of learning to listen to sound, Medical Teacher 39(1): 79 – 84.

Harris, Anna (2016). Teaching the boogie woogie rather than 99?: A reflection on how words travel in medicine, Journal of Graduate Medical Education 8(5): 793-794.

Harris, Anna (2016). Listening-touch, affect and the crafting of medical bodies through percussion. Body & Society 22(1): 31–61

[this article was chosen to be in the anthology: Howes, David ed. 2018. Senses and Sensation: Critical and Primary Sources, Vols. I-IV. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic]

Harris, Anna. (2016). Embodiment, in Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology, edited by John Jackson. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harris, Anna (2016). The sensory archive. The Senses and Society 11(3): 345 – 350.

Harris, Anna (2015). The hollow knock and other sounds in recipes, Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 15(4): 14 – 17.

Harris, Anna (2015). Eliciting sound memories. The Public Historian 37(4): 14 – 31.

Harris, Anna (2015). The blackboard anatomist. British Medical Journal 350: h345.

Harris, Anna and van Drie, Melissa (2015). Sharing sound: Teaching, learning and researching sonic skills, Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1(1): 98 – 117.